12B local models now rival GPT-4, and tiered local AI is coming, argues Wardell
draginol · x · 2026-09-04
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell lays out five quick takes on local AI: small models have improved drastically in the past 90 days — a 12B model now roughly matches old GPT-4 for most uses. His team is building a Llama/harness integration optimized for 0.6B–27B, enabling a tiered approach: local hardware → rack → cloud for enterprises, local → cloud for consumers. Local AI harness engineering prioritizes determinism and real-world use cases. He also calls the virtual cloud PC strategy a dead end, likening it to solving FSD with Lidar.
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